DISCLAIMER: Nothing but headcanon and plot belongs to me. All characters are credited to JK Rowling.
.:oOo:.
He shifted his hands, an idle movement, to curl them in his coat pockets and ignore how he could barely feel his fingers, despite it being nearly summer. Sinking lower where he sat, he pushed his heels through the patch of grass he'd conjured to slither through the crevices of the cobblestone just under and around the bench. It wasn't quite intentional, but it formed around his feet and curled around his shoes until he willed it away when he finally noticed.
It'd just come back when he looked ahead again.
George sat on a bench, as quiet as the street was just before dawn. It was like the birds had abandoned their perches atop buildings they weren't supposed to nest upon, like the trees so far in the distance could no longer carry the sound of rustling with them to sweep through and over the Alley. Footsteps were a foreign concept, as they would come later, when the world woke up and proper light was shed upon the ruins that had him so rooted to the spot.
He blinked slowly, not often, and tipped his head to the side just so – to get a look at a different angle. From where he sat, a fair distance away, (just beside Amanuensis Quills, to be exact, not that he'd read the signs) he could see the entirety of it. The skeleton of his dreams, - their dreams - all ambition and hope and life. It was but a cracked and broken husk of what was, what should still be, and what he'd abandoned—
George closed his eyes, but he could still see the wreckage behind his eyelids, that twitched with lack of sleep and focus. He could still see the snapped window panes that had been half blown out of the shapes they were fitted to line, every bend and twist in metal and brick; ways that he didn't even know metal and brick could twist. He could imagine what lay past the broken-down door.
Just envisioning the mangled Pygmy Puff cages strewn about a yards worth of of activated Portable Swamps fused with miscellaneous powders and goo on the floor made him sick with the thought that the little mounds in the muck weren't rocks, for there were flecks of pink and purple poking through the sludge…
He hadn't been inside yet, so he wouldn't know.
The giant head above the entrance wasn't there anymore, — or visible anyway, as it could be sunken inside the caved in walls, — but he could imagine it as clear as day; A gaping, lopsided grin, demented and morphed by an unhinged jaw. Eyes ripped out of its sockets leaving crackling wires protruding from the holes, like maggots and worms in the skull of a person long since buried… having eaten through the coffin, first, of course. Cheeks and forehead caving in from curses, the top hat and arm ripped clean off to reveal a thoroughly bashed in skull, though it seemed more like it had taken several crushing blows to the face. Or like a heavy rock had fallen on it…
Opening his eyes again, he hadn't realized all of those images passed through his head on merely a blink. Every span of darkness felt like ten thousand years and every time he brought himself back to light, he was back where he started; too young with too much ahead of him that he didn't want. Every silence felt too loud, and yet, he couldn't bring himself to utter a sound, nor a thought for just his own mind. His own voice was a crippling reminder, though not nearly as such as the one in his head, which stood even taller and sunk so much deeper.
It would only be a piece of a thought, because there was no one to volley it back.
It felt like going deaf in both ears, but knowing he wasn't only made him wish he was. Just to hush the universe and not have to think about the consequences of not responding when his name was called. So he wouldn't have to think about the things he left behind, and had been left with.
For a moment, though, and without knowing why, he thought of Harry, and those first thousand Galleons they'd been so reluctant to take but so, so grateful for from the second he left the compartment. He closed his eyes again, and instead of broken boxes and scrap metal, he saw a streak of purple as his mind passed bright colored bricks and stepped through an upright door, into color and chaos that made his throat ache with longing and guilt.
But the image was gone the second he reopened his eyes again, and found himself looking upon nothing but the shattered, dismantled disgrace that he thought he would always be able to go home to. Take care of.
George swallowed a sigh and blinked across the street, the grass beneath his shoe shriveling into dead weeds and shrinking back into the stone.
.:oOo:.